Jeffrey Brenner's Revolutionary Approach to Improving Health Care Delivery

The sickest 5 percent of patients in the U.S. account for over half of the nation's health care costs. In New Jersey, Jeffrey Brenner, MD, developed a revolutionary community-based approach to both lower health care costs and provide better care: identify the most expensive patients in the health care system and direct resources and brainpower toward helping them. Using data to map "hot spots" of health care high-utilizers-one patient had gone to the hospital 113 times in a year-Brenner and his team at the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers found a better, cheaper way to treat these costly patients through collaborative care, reducing hospital visits and costs by 40 to 50 percent.
The RWJF is now testing the Camden Coalition method in communities across the country. Learn how your community can benefit from health care hot spotting: forces4quality.org/patient-cen...
Hot Spotting Leads to Better Care at a Lower Cost: Early Finding
• Care coordination reduces the overall cost of care for people who have complex, chronic conditions. This has implications for Medicare and Medicaid, which pay for the bulk of this group's health expenses.
• Hot spotting turbocharges our ability to improve the health of certain populations by showing where and how to apply tested public health approaches to quality improvement -- and ultimately reduce costs.
• Addressing high-utilizer patients' social needs is as important as addressing their medical needs. Most patients require assistance to set up crucial supports such as meal delivery, accessible housing, transportation to appointments, and follow-up care once they leave the hospital.
• The way providers are paid for care must change to better reward and incentivize care coordination, which leads to better quality and reduced costs.
Learn more about health care hot spotting: www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/new...

[@jore354]

Great work Dr. Brenner! I'm speachless.